Chevron USA v Natural Resources Defense Council

Chevron USA v Natural Resources Defense Council is a 1984 decision of the United States Supreme Court that for four decades governed how much deference courts give federal agencies interpreting ambiguous statutes. The Environmental Protection Agency had interpreted the term stationary source in the Clean Air Act to let a plant treat every pollution emitting device inside it as one single source under a bubble concept, which environmental groups challenged as contrary to the statutes purpose. The Court held that where a statute is silent or ambiguous on a specific question, a reviewing court should defer to an agencys reasonable interpretation of the statute it administers, rather than substitute its own reading. This Chevron deference framework became one of the most cited doctrines in American administrative law until the Supreme Court overruled it in 2024 in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, a later development for a depth or edges wave to capture as this atlas own case-status fact.